What Is the Solution for Gaza?

Israel Has Failed in Crucial Test; Her Policies Have Alienated Arabs

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“JERUSALEM — The so-called Gaza Strip is, and always has been, an integral part of Palestine. Egypt’s occupation and administration of it was a result of the Palestinian war and the cease-fire that found her troops there, as it found Israeli troops in many sections of Palestine that had never been granted to Israel by the 1947 U. N. partition plan.

The inhabitants of Gaza territory are 100 per cent Palestinian Arabs, either native—whose ancestors were settled there for millennia—or fugitives from Israel. The latter constitute around three-fourths of the Gaza population. None is Egyptian, and Egypt has not annexed the territory but administered it.

The original partition scheme envisaged a Jewish and an Arab state in Palestine. Although the Palestinian Arabs were twice as numerous as the Jews and owned all except 7 per cent of the land, Israel was awarded more than half of it, but on condition that no Arabs should be displaced and that the two states be economically integrated.

Actually, four-fifths were displaced, their land and properties taken over by Israel, which has happened also in the territories annexed but never assigned to Israel. No compensation has been paid them.

Unlimited Jewish immigration has, meanwhile, more than replaced the original inhabitants—who could not possibly maintain themselves in the area in Palestine left to the Arabs, even if they could call upon foreign funds to the same extent as the Israeli… Israel wants the territory but not the Arab population of Gaza or anywhere else.

In the face of world opinion, she could hardly repeat the performance of driving them out… The late Judah Magnes, an American Jew, and rector of the University of Jerusalem, remembering the days when Arabs and Jews together, in the time of the dissolution of the Roman Empire, reached the highest point of Semitic achievement, worked for a new Palestine for the Palestinians, Jew and Arab.

But he died broken-hearted.”

Context added by this archive

A nationally syndicated columnist in 1957 with the numbers and the verbs: twice as numerous, all but 7% of the land, four-fifths displaced, no compensation paid, and Israel could hardly repeat the performance of driving them out. The same column is contemptuous about communism and about the Arab masses, and finishes on Samson pulling the temple down.

Cite this clipping

"What Is the Solution for Gaza?," Evening Star, 11 March 1957, p. 1. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1957-016. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1957-016